Franz Kline

Franz Kline moved from figurative urban landscapes toward complete abstraction in the late 1940s after projecting his small ink sketches onto a studio wall with a Bell-Opticon projector. Blown up to colossal proportions, the black strokes lost their representational identity and transformed into raw, muscular armatures of pure architectural power.

Using broad house-painter brushes and commercial enamel, Kline constructed dynamic black-and-white paintings where white paint was applied with the same aggressive intentionality as the black, creating an electrifying collision of positive and negative space. His sudden death at 51 cut short one of the most vital careers in modern American painting.